Amazon S3 is a data storage service. It underpins many of today's high-profile web services. Despite offering enterprise-grade resilience, performance and features, it's pretty easy to start with. It is affordable, and it provides a simple API for automated access. It's one of many cloud services in the growing Amazon Web Services (AWS) portfolio.

APIs change every now and then, and they are usually given a version number so that we can track them. We'll be working with the current version of the S3 REST API, "2006-03-01".

You'll notice that in the S3 documentation and elsewhere, the S3 web API is referred to as a REST API. REST stands for Representational State Transfer, and it is a fairly academic conception of how HTTP should be used for APIs, originally presented by Roy Fielding in his PhD dissertation. Although the properties that an API should possess so as to be considered RESTful are quite specific, in practice pretty much any API that is based on HTTP is now slapped...